Way, way, back in 1981 B.C. (before cellphones), Michael Crichton, who brought us Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, dabbled in a slice of cake from the deep fakery bakery. It was a little-known movie called Looker. As was his theme, it was a cautionary sci-fi tale ala, “don’t f*ck with Mother Nature or the dinosaurs will come back and eat you.” Only this time, the evildoers in the movie were trying to out engineer Mother Nature. Notably by creating the perfect advertisi

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been on job interviews, and on many of them I would’ve been crushed if I got hired. I’ve worked in retail, including an upscale coffee store in Westwood (I got fired for “lack of enthusiasm”) and a now-defunct store in Soho called Think Big. It was the ultimate targeted-at-yuppies’-self-indulgence-store selling wonderfully useless things, like gigantic Crayons, four-foot-tall No. 2 pencils, and massive baseball mitts. There was a great s

On Friday, November 22, 1963, about a month before my sixth birthday, I was playing with my favorite little yellow tractors on a small patch of dirt by the side of our house in Daly City, a suburb just a few miles south of San Francisco. The late-autumn sun had risen over the top of the water tower up on Skyline Drive and was trying its best to fight its way through the morning fog. A breeze coming in off the Pacific helped it along, gently pushing the fog east where it would